In the winter, when the vines dry up, Henry becomes old and stiff again. When the leaves come out on the grapevine, hair also begins to grow on Henry's head and he becomes spry and young-seeming. Since he has brought her the ham, she arranges things so that he can eat the grapes without ill effect. The next spring, Henry takes a ham to Aunt Peggy who tells him to take the sap that oozes out of the cuts when Mars Dugal prunes the grapevines and use it to annoint his bald head. She gives him a medicine to take, and says that he should come to him the next spring and she would tell him what to do. The next spring, one of the plantation hands dies and Mars Dugal buys another, who eats from the grapevine before he is told of the goopher, and the overseer takes him to Aunt Peggy the next day to see if she can take the goopher off of him since he at the grapes in ignorance. At the end of that season, Mars Dugal' has made fifteen hundred instead of his usual ten hundred gallons of wine. The coachman of a man who comes to visit Mars Dugal dies after eating some grapes when his horse runs away, and a child also dies (whites say of the fever) after eating the grapes. After getting shot himself by the spring guns, he looks around for another deterrent and decides to visit the conjure woman Aunt Peggy, who goophers the grapevines and informs the other blacks that any of them who eat those grapes will die within two months. Mars Dugal' makes a thousand gallons of scuppernong wine every year, but soon he begins to miss his grapes and so sets spring guns and steel traps and has the overseer sit up nights to find who is stealing the grapes. Marse Dugal McAdoo plants scuppernong grapes, which Julius explains are as beloved by blacks as possum, chicken and watermelon. When John tells Julius that he is considering buying the plantation, Uncle Julius advises against it and explains that the vineyard is goophered, and when John asks how he tells the story that forms the inner narrative of this piece. There was a shrewdness in his eyes, too, which was not altogether African, and which, as we afterwards learned from experience was indicative of a corresponding shrewdness in his character" (9-10). The narrator observes, "He was not entirely black, and this fact, together with the quality of his hair, which was about six inches long and very bushy, except on the top of his head, where he was quite bald, suggested a slight strain of other than negro blood. When John takes Annie out to see the place, they come across a mulatto man seated on a log eating grapes. John takes a particular interest an estate that had belonged to a wealthy man named McAdoo but which has since been the subject of dispute between his heirs and has suffered neglect. They had enjoyed the cousin's hospitality and liked the area, and John learned that grape cultivation had been practiced there but the industry has apparently suffered during the war. A cousin had recommended his own neighborhood of Patesville, and the couple had gone to visit and look into the matter. The speaker (John) and his wife Annie have moved from the Great Lakes region some years earlier for the wife's health on the advice of the family doctor. Patesville - McAdoo plantation in the years leading up to the Civil War Patesville, North Carolina - a town of 4-5,000 but one of the principle towns of North Carolina and with a good trade in cotton and naval stores - Post-reconstruction South Yankee salesman - sells Mars Dugal McAdoo a wine press and ruins his vineyard during a weeklong stay in which he wins $1000 from McAdoo playing cards settlement of free blacks by the Wim'l'ton Road Ole Mars Dugal McAdoo - former owner of the plantation Julius McAdoo - former slave, trickster figure in these stories John's cousin - in the turpentine business, assures John that his own neighborhood is ideal for John and Annie John - the speaker, a white carpetbagger who moves South for his wife's health and takes up cultivating a grape vineyard The Conjure Woman and Other Tales by Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1899)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |